Tech Lead Journal1 Sep 2025

#231 - Faster Code Reviews, Faster Code Shipping with Stacked PRs - Greg Foster

Are long code review cycles killing your engineering team’s velocity? Learn how top engineering teams are shipping code faster without sacrificing quality.

In this episode, Greg Foster, CTO and co-founder of Graphite, discusses the evolution of code review practices, from the fundamentals of pull requests to the future of AI in code review workflows. He shares the secrets behind how the Graphite team became one of the most productive engineering teams by leveraging techniques like small code changes and stacked PRs (pull requests).

Key topics discussed:

The evolution of code review from bug-hunting to knowledge sharing
Best practices for PRs and why small PRs get better feedback
How stacked PRs eliminate waiting time in development workflows
The rise of AI in the code review process
Why AI code review works best as an automated CI check
How Graphite achieves P99 engineering productivity
Hiring engineers in the age of AI-assisted coding

Timestamps:

(00:00) Trailer & Intro
(02:21) Career Turning Points
(05:11) Now is The Golden Time to Be in Software Engineering
(09:08) The Evolution of Code Review in Software Development
(14:59) The Popularity of Pull Request Workflow
(21:01) Pull Request Best Practices
(26:17) The Stacked PR and Its Benefits
(34:07) How Graphite Ships Code Remarkably Fast
(40:03) The Cool Things About AI Code Review
(45:23) Graphite’s Unique Recipes for Engineering Productivity
(50:55) Hiring Engineers in the Age of AI
(55:31) 2 Tech Lead Wisdom

_____

Greg Foster’s Bio
Greg Foster is the CTO and co-founder of Graphite, an a16z and Anthropic-backed company helping teams like Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity ship faster and scale AI-generated code with confidence. Prior to Graphite, Greg was a dev tools engineer at Airbnb. There, he experienced the impact of robust internal tooling on developer velocity and co-founded Graphite to bring powerful, AI-powered code review to every team. Greg holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Follow Greg:

LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/gregmfoster
X – x.com/gregmfoster
Email – greg@graphite.dev
Graphite – graphite.dev
Graphite X – x.com/withgraphite

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/231.
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